1. Field
Embodiments of the present invention relate to tape drives and more specifically to signal-and-transducer alignment in a tape drive.
2. Background Art
Tape drives read and write data on magnetic tapes. They commonly write data to and read data from multiple data tracks which run parallel to one another over the length of the tape. A given drive has a tape head which includes one or more data readers and data writers for respectively reading and writing the tracks.
With increasing track density, properly aligning the tape and the tape head becomes increasingly important. For example, as the tape moves past the tape head, lateral drift of the tape can result in the tape drive reading or writing a wrong data track—or doing so at an imprecise location. To mitigate errors resulting from lateral drift, many tape drives have servo readers on the tape head that maintain alignment with pre-written servo tracks on the tape during read and write operations.
However, as track density further increases, variances in the manufacture of the tape head can cause tracks to be read from, or written to, the wrong location. For example, in the fabrication of certain tape heads, servo readers and data readers may be defined in one layer of the tape head, whereas data writers may be defined in another layer. A non-ideal fabrication of the tape head may cause a layer-to-layer offset, resulting in an incorrect distance between the servo readers and the data writers. This can result in imprecise reading and writing operations.